The spiking irregularity of MSTd neurons depends on visual and oculomotor variables
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1
LMU, Clinical Neurosciences, Germany
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2
BCCN Munich, Germany
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3
LMU, Integrated Center for Research and Treatment of Vertigo, Germany
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4
University of Washington, Washington National Primate Research Center, United States
Neuronal activity in macaque cortical area MSTd is driven by retinal stimuli, as almost all neurons respond to moving large-field patterns. At the same time, the spiking activity in MSTd is modulated by an internally generated signal related to the monkey’s eye movements. This combination of both visual motion and eye movement related activity makes MSTd an ideal system for analyzing neuronal activity in dependence on different stimulus dimensions. In this work we analyzed the inter- and intra-trial variability of spiking activity by measuring Fano factor (FF), squared coefficient of variation (CV²) and local variation (LV). Two different paradigms were used: fixation with visual stimulation and optokinetic response to a moving large-field stimulus. For the first condition our results complied with a recent neurophysiological study reporting stimulus-related decline in neuronal variability. The second condition, however, revealed opposing behavior. We found that both stimulus variables, retinal image velocity and eye velocity, differentially affected neuronal variability. Spiking irregularity decreased when image velocity increased and eye velocity was kept low, but increased with increasing eye velocity and low image velocity. This finding might reflect a specificity of the local network structure or could be related to the variability characteristics of the input signals. Nevertheless, the observed behaviour may also have functional importance reflecting additional timing-based coding independent of the neuron's mean firing rate.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Grants 01GQ0440 (BCCN), 01EO0901 (IFB), and National Institutes of Health Grants EY06069, RR000166.
Keywords:
eye movement control,
Fano factor,
MST,
neuronal variability,
spiking irregularity,
Visual System
Conference:
BC11 : Computational Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Bernstein Conference & Neurex Annual Meeting 2011, Freiburg, Germany, 4 Oct - 6 Oct, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
neural encoding and decoding (please use "neural coding and decoding" as keyword)
Citation:
Brostek
L,
Büttner
U,
Mustari
MJ and
Glasauer
S
(2011). The spiking irregularity of MSTd neurons depends on visual and oculomotor variables.
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
BC11 : Computational Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Bernstein Conference & Neurex Annual Meeting 2011.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2011.53.00228
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Received:
04 Aug 2011;
Published Online:
04 Oct 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Lukas Brostek, LMU, Clinical Neurosciences, München, Germany, Lukas.Brostek@lrz.uni-muenchen.de